The landed elite in England played a vital role in local administration. Only they had the time and funds, as well as the authority, effectively to govern the county. Over the course of his life Cavendish filled virtually all of the most important and prestigious offices in Derbyshire apart from the post of deputy lieutenant. Perhaps the reason for this was his uneasy relationship with his brother-in-law, Gilbert Talbot, who succeeded his father as lord lieutenant in 1590, or was related to the fact that others wanted it more, as his neighbour Sir Francis Leake did in 1603. Maybe Cavendish had other priorities, ones that kept him in the capital. As befitted a man of his status he paid his respects to James I, riding to York when the king travelled south to claim his inheritance in 1603. He also entertained Prince Charles at Hardwick in 1619. As sheriff in 1595–6 he met the judges of the Midland assize circuit at the Derbyshire border when they conducted gaol delivery county by county at the twice-annual assizes. From there, he escorted them to their lodgings. While he seems only occasionally to have attended meetings of the quarter sessions, he regularly travelled to the assizes until the second decade of the seventeenth century. As a commissioner for the subsidy he performed the thankless task of extracting money from his peers and other tax-payers and organising the transportation of the money to London.

Treating

By the time Cavendish served his year as high sheriff the office had lost many of its medieval functions, and with them the power that its holder could wield. The county court over which he presided continued to meet, but it did little more than elect knights of the shire in parliamentary elections. The sheriff still returned writs and empanelled juries, which, as Loades points out, ‘could be politically sensitive work in a local context’, and therefore enabled him to use his influence in his own interest. But it was costly, and never more so than when the assize judges came to the county. Once settled in their lodging, the judges were well looked after.

SPEAKING OF HIS South African contemporaries Breyten Breytenbach, Athol Fugard, and Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee strikes a distinctly fraternal note: “If I must try to specify in what spirit I read [them], I would say above all it is in a spirit of sympathy. I believe I know from the inside some of what, in their very different ways, they have confronted and sometimes overcome, sometimes failed to overcome.” This sense of Coetzee's sharing “from the inside” the possibilities and limitations facing South African writers extends beyond his immediate contemporaries, reaching across the entire canon of the country's “culture of letters” past and present (to borrow a phrase from his collection of essays on the subject, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa).

On occasion, the sense of shared endeavor—even with writers of the distant past—is surprisingly intimate. For example, in the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown (NELM), where he has deposited the lecture notes from his years of teaching at the State University of New York in Buffalo (1968–71) and the University of Cape Town (1972–2001), among papers (1972–2001) relating to a course on comparative South African literature taught in 1993 there is a page of reflections on Olive Schreiner. The direction of these notes is not that they seek to understand Schreiner's work per se, but that Schreiner is a mirror in which Coetzee reflects on his own career. The notes are therefore autobiographical and worth following in some detail. On the evidence of African Farm, Coetzee writes, Schreiner was “a young person, not so much testing ideas as testing for the first time the possibility that ideas can explain reality. Later it is more a matter of deploying ideas. Generally, it is not important that writers have good ideas. Rather, it is a matter of seeing a mimesis of intellectual engagement.” Since the worth of a writer's ideas is less important than what she does with them, there are further questions: what is the source of the power that makes the mimesis credible, and how well does the writer understand that power, to ensure its continued renewal? He believes that Schreiner mistook the source of her creativity.

The aristocratic lifestyle was largely funded by the income that peers obtained from their landed estates, which during the period 1597–1623 was likely to be going up. Prices were rising for the products produced on their estates, as a growing population increased demand for foodstuffs and other basic commodities. If these items were mainly agricultural, fortunate landowners like William Cavendish, who had workable mineral deposits on their property, could earn an income from industrial ones too. Even continuing as before was likely to bring in additional money, that is, if they farmed their demesnes. Enclosure and improvement of wastes and open fields further augmented their income by raising output, whether in stocking rates on pastures or crop yields in the fields. When leases fell in, new ones were shorter and more expensive, mainly because of enhanced entry fines. Alternatively, a landowner could add the land to his demesne. As William Cavendish was a very astute manager of his finances, he did all of these things, although the size of the demesne on various manors did fluctuate over the course of the period.

Economically, the contribution that a stud made to the finances of a demesne farmer like William Cavendish was small, even excluding the money he received in rent. Unfortunately, his receipt books have not survived, but for a large-scale grazier such as him the value of his fatstock and wool far outweighed that of his crop of foals. Beeves and fattened wether sheep, fed on the estate, also helped to supply the dietary requirements of a large household and reduce expenditure on foodstuffs. Even so, by facilitating the management of a large scattered estate, horses, some of them bred in the stud, made an essential contribution to the generation of income. Officers like Roger Fretwell and Robert Parker were constantly in the saddle, riding around Cavendish's estate as they dealt with tenants and bailiffs and oversaw work on the demesne. Atkinson and his staff handled equine-related matters, and other servants carried out a wide range of specific tasks. Many of the servants were provided with a horse and either a replacement from the stud or an allowance to buy one when needed. The sums allocated enabled them to buy mounts of a reasonable quality: it would not do for Cavendish's representative to be seen riding an inferior jade.

The Different Tasks of Cosmopolitan Ethics

A COSMOPOLITAN MORALITY hardly depends on cosmopolitan ethics by being implied in its analytic view of morality. By “morality” I think of the psychological potential, in use or not, to behave cooperatively and pro-socially under conflicts of interest. “Cosmopolitan morality” would then encompass the psychological powers in real people, worldwide, answering the conflicts arising when people from different world regions, and different historical cultures, levels of economy, and spheres of religion are engaging in increasingly close contact. To make things more complicated, conflicts of interest arise not only among those actually cooperating, but also with those intentionally or arbitrarily excluded from cooperation. Within a growing net of interconnections there is no state of isolation. If the economically least efficient states are excluded from cooperation, then they will encounter side-effects of the global process, for example, in the form of global climate change. Given the process of globalization, the possibility of a global morality of sorts is obviously of crucial interest.

Cosmopolitan ethics assumes the task of analyzing the prospects for a global morality. Being largely philosophical ethics, its manner of analysis may be one-sided—one-sided in choosing “concepts” and “argument” as the only proper content of morality. Following the Humean tradition in moral philosophy, however, cosmopolitan ethics can also undertake the job of laying bare the motivational and emotional fundament that gives rise to moral attitudes and beliefs. This can be done with varying degrees of stringency, and a huge divide in moral philosophy is particularly built around one difference. Are all moral beliefs, and thereby obligations and rights, to be dissolved into moral motivations and behavioral tendencies, or is this not possible? Do some moral beliefs stand up by themselves, so to speak, and proffer obligations and rights on their own? Is our moral thinking more flexible and far-reaching than our moral feelings by not being restricted to the latter's bodily lethargy?

These are the two philosophical traditions that demand a hearing in this moral dispute, to be dubbed the “Humean” and the “Kantian.” They are “philosophical” in that their focus is not on a specific moral decision in the first place, something we are confronted with in everyday life (buy the “fair-trade” article or not?), but on the “inner workings” of our moral capacities and their moral and social potential.

The introduction and subsequent diffusion of private coaches around the country from the mid-sixteenth century onwards meant that it was now easier for a member of the landed elite like Cavendish to travel with his family and servants. The expansion of the postal system and the growth in the number of hackneymen made it possible for travellers to hire horses, while the establishment of a nationwide network of carrying services linking London with the provinces ensured that luggage could be delivered over long distances. Wayside inns proliferated too. Even so, journeys between the provinces and London were still arduous and time-consuming. When Cavendish and his peers travelled to London, their entourage was a larger and more varied one than was needed when they made provinicial visits, with more servants, vehicles, horses and luggage.

The passage of the cavalcade was an impressive sight, causing ripples of excitement as it trundled through town and village. On 9 December 1608 John Chamberlain, an astute commentator on the London scene, observed that Sir Henry Carey and his wife had come to town in great pomp, with five coaches, many horsemen and the pregnant Lady Carey seated on a litter. Cavendish travelled with fewer people in his party but it would still have attracted attention. At the beginning of Michaelmas Term 1601 he went with six servants and eleven horses but returned in December with seven servants, a gentlewoman appointed for his mother and thirteen horses. In April 1604 the widowed Cavendish travelled to London with nine servants and fourteen horses. Then, eighteen months later, he set out with his new wife, Lady Elizabeth, and his niece Arbella, accompanied by sixteen servants, including footmen and the drivers of the sumpters, and twenty-five horses. This was a special occasion, for Cavendish, elevated to the peerage in the spring as a result of Lady Arbella's nomination, was due to be presented in the House of Lords on 12 November.

Travel to and from London

When Cavendish made the long journey down to London after the death of his first wife he surely rode, as many men of his age and status would have done. Neither would he have altered his travel arrangements on those occasions when his second wife did not accompany him.

IN DAVID LODGE's CAMPUS NOVEL Small World (1984), Persse, a young Irish lecturer at Limerick University College, talks about his master's thesis with Felix Skinner, a publisher who offers to publish his book:

The relation between Shakespeare and Eliot that Persse puts forward is not one of traditional influence of the earlier on the later work, but fostered “preposterously”—a term Mieke Bal uses to describe an act of reversal that “puts the chronologically first (pre-) as an aftereffect behind (post-) its later recycling.” Coetzee's fiction is constituted through such “preposterous” relations between literary voices: each voice engages with voices from other texts, which address, challenge, ironize, allegorize each other without any of them posing as a stable origin. Can the experience of reading Robinson Crusoe ever be the same after reading Foe?

The interplay of voices from other literary works and narratives in Coetzee's fiction often prompts allegorical readings. However, his novels frustrate attempts to translate this allegoricity into propositional messages or external frames. The Childhood of Jesus (COJ) is no exception to this: its title sets the reader on a track of discovering analogies with the New Testament narrative of Jesus. But although Biblical motifs permeate the narrative, the novel, surprisingly, unravels in a new world that has cut ties with past traditions.

In the novel's world, people have renounced history, tradition, and cultural memory. The reception center in which the protagonist, Simón, and the five-year-old child, David, arrive after a long journey is called “Novilla.” This name evokes the novel, a new start, as well as an act of negation: as a non-city (no-villa), this center disavows ties with other worlds. Ana, the woman they meet at the reception center, tells Simón: “People here have washed themselves clean of old ties.

On 9 January 1616 John Holles esquire wrote a letter to his son John, then completing his education in Paris, in which he stressed the importance of good horsemanship as a defining quality of a gentleman but also indicated other skills that he should possess. He framed his advice as a question, the one quoted above. Clearly, the sons of the landed elite should receive a rounded education, one that might highlight the importance of horsemanship but provided them with social graces suitable for the salon as well. And in Baldesar Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, they had a code of behaviour to follow. Cavendish certainly knew the book, because in September 1605 his 15-year-old son, William, earned £5 for translating it into Latin and English. Cavendish's nephew, William Cavendish, the expert horseman, endorsed Castiglione's approach to learning life-skills when he wrote about the ‘music’ of training a horse, declaring that he ‘that has not a musical head can never be a good horseman. A horse well dressed moves as true, and keeps as regular time as any musician can.’

Horsemanship

Holles's exhortation to his son, with its emphasis on horsemanship and weaponhandling, reflects the importance of these skills to the landed elite as members of the cavalry in wartime. Indeed, many of Cavendish's contemporaries argued that the fashion for travelling by coach had led to a decline of horsemanship and, as a result, a shortage in the number of gentlemen who could fight on horseback. This did not materialise, but the firearm revolution and the shift in priorities in favour of the infantry did undermine the cavalry's historic role as heavily armoured men-of-war, armed with lances and riding powerful great horses. Even if England lagged behind the continent – Cavendish was still buying lances to supply soldiers serving in Ireland at the turn of the sixteenth century – change was apparent by then.

MY OVERARCHING INTEREST in this chapter is in the materialization of thought (and hence the projection of a subjective consciousness) in language. Any utterance obliges the speaker or writer to make linguistic and other formal choices, and these choices, in turn, generate a particular force field between speaker and listener; writer and reader; me and you. Part of our brief for the conference held in Brisbane in April 2015 was to speak about Coetzee's European influences. My point of departure is to consider some aspects of Coetzee's engagements with Dutch— not to focus on direct linguistic and literary influences and resonances, but, more philosophically, to open onto a discussion of the ways in which the interference of another language can help to shed light on linguistic forces at work in our own.

I begin by looking at Coetzee's translation and discussion of “Ballade van de Gasfitter” (a sonnet sequence by Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg) and then move on to consider Het Goede Verhaal: the Dutch translation of Coetzee's most recent book, The Good Story, coauthored with psychotherapist, Arabella Kurtz. My discussion here focuses on the Dutch word verzinnen—to make up, or to invent— yet with an etymological resonance of “making sense of.” It is a cliché to speak about what is lost in translation; this essay broaches the question of what is gained in translation. In this context, an important conceptual touchstone is Coetzee's 1982 essay, “Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language”: I conclude the essay with a brief consideration of this piece. Newton faced unexpected linguistic challenges (with far-reaching consequences for the reception of his theories) when it came to writing in English rather than in Latin about the force of gravity. In its careful reflection on problems of translation and the complex relation between syntactic and subjective agency in English, the Newton essay brings together my two main lines of enquiry.

If the young John of Youth is to be believed, Coetzee's relation to Dutch does not hold out too much promise. John gives a rather unflattering account of his Netherlandic heritage:

The landed elite regularly socialised with their peers, but giving and receiving hospitality entailed travel, and although the condition of the highways was not as difficult as was once assumed, one had to take care, especially in rugged countryside like the Peak. Viewing the Peak from Chatsworth in the 1720s, Defoe observed that ‘Upon the top of that mountain begins a vast extended moor or waste, which for fifteen or sixteen miles together due north, presents you with neither hedge, house or tree, but a waste and howling wilderness, over which when strangers travel, they are obliged to take guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way.’ The lack of signposts, which were not compulsory until an Act of 1697, compounded the problem, especially in barren areas such as the Peak where even locals had to hire guides. While riding into Lancashire in the severe winter of 1614–15 Lionel, one of Cavendish's servants, required two guides to help him navigate his way across the Peak moors (‘that beinge great snowe’). Cavendish also required a guide on a visit to Buxton in August 1608. He and his party had been staying with Sir John Manners at Haddon Hall, and he hired a guide to take them to Buxton, paying him 1s. for his services. It seems as though Cavendish particularly wanted to visit Pooles Hole, a magnificent limestone cave inhabited in prehistoric times and a tourist attraction by 1600. He paid 1s. to a guide to take the company to the cave.

Socialising

Outwardly, the landed elite demonstrated their status by the way they conducted themselves and their relations with their peers, clients and dependants, hence Wotton's concern that the medieval notion of hospitality based on maintaining open house to all comers was fading. Of course, some individuals continued the custom: Sir Gervase Clifton of Clifton Hall (Nottinghamshire) ‘generously, hospitably and charitably entertained all, from the King to the poorest Beggar’. Sir John Weld of Willey Hall (Shropshire), on the other hand, advised his son ‘not to be busy in Building nor in too much hospitality’ as these two major items of expenditure would waste his estate.

J. M. COETZEE IS ONE OF the most important living authors. His ethics, a crucial factor in that importance, might be described, following W. B. Yeats, as the desire “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.” 1 Yet such a desire is by no means easily satisfied. In fact, a study of Coetzee's literary production since 1974, the year of publication of Dusklands, Coetzee's first novel, suggests that the desire for a just reality might ultimately remain unanswered. Despite this sober prospect, the ethical search, on the testimony of Coetzee's recent fiction, has lost none of its urgency for Coetzee. Indeed, we may take two of these works with their allusive titles, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), as a reminder of the ongoing importance of the ethical substrate in Coetzee's vision of the world.

The essays gathered in this volume recognize and honor, as well as assess and critique, Coetzee's continuing commitment to the ethical search. They do so in the conviction that, some time ago, Coetzee's exploration of ethical matters took him into areas of knowledge beyond a purely literary sensibility. At least since the publication in 2010 of Leist's and Singer's important collection of essays on Coetzee's ethics, it has become clear that Coetzee's forays into philosophy merit the attention of philosophers, not just philosophically interested literary critics and theoreticians. Following this lead, both philosophers and literary scholars come together again in the present volume to offer new assessments of Coetzee's attempts to arrive at an ethical understanding that is matched with, and takes proper account of, the complexity of our age. The novelty of the present volume does not only lie with the ambition to connect and interweave literary and philosophical discourses. It also lies with the desire to put European, if not to say, mainly Germanic, conversations about literature and philosophy in the same space as those issuing in the Anglophone domain in order that profit might be had from both. This two-fold intention was the original motivation for the conference at the University of Queensland in 2015 that anticipated this collection of essays, just as it remains the ambition of the collection now in its greatly expanded published form.

Disgrace and Counterfocalization

THE QUESTION OF CHARACTER has not received a great deal of attention in recent decades, other than in more strictly narratological studies. All the more reason, then, to welcome John Frow's new book, Character and Person, which ranges richly over a number of topics and literary examples to offer a nuanced account of the operation of character in fiction, making clear the dialectical relation between our construction of characters as we read and our construction of each other, as persons, in our daily lives. One thread that runs through Frow's discussion is the connection between “thinking of characters as pieces of writing or imaging, and thinking of them as person-like entities.” “These two ways of thinking about character,” he adds, “are logically difficult to hold together; and yet we do so in our every encounter with fictional character” (25). Our pleasure in reading a novel, that is, lies simultaneously in a willing suspension of disbelief whereby we respond to characters as if they had lives beyond the words in which they are conveyed to us and in an appreciation of the writer's handling of language and generic conventions in such a way as to create this illusion.

The question of character is at the heart of a recent disagreement between two acute readers of Disgrace, Gayatri Spivak and Simon During, the former in her mammoth volume An Aesthetic Education in the Time of Globalization and the latter in a PMLA forum on that volume. The disagreement arises in connection with a facet of the novel that has garnered a great deal of commentary: Lucy Lurie's refusal to lay charges against the three men who have raped her, or even to fully explain her refusal to her father—a silence which has the consequence that as readers we, too, are kept in ignorance of her motivation, since Coetzee's fictional mode allows us no information beyond what David Lurie knows. (Lucy is not literally silent, of course, but much of her thinking in the wake of the rape remains obscure to her father and thus to the reader.) Spivak embraces the narratological concept of “focalization” to discuss this feature of the novel, taking the term from Mieke Bal, who herself adopts it from Gérard Genette.

ON MACQUARIE ISLAND, an uninhabited island in the Southern Pacific Ocean belonging to Australia, Elizabeth Costello encounters an albatross. The bird “regards her steadily,” and Costello, leaving aside all the poetical associations the bird might evoke for a writer from Coleridge to Baudelaire, experiences a prelapsarian moment: “Before the fall, she thinks. This is how it must have been before the fall” (56).

Now, however—the lesson “The Novel in Africa,” the second from the book Elizabeth Costello, is, like almost the whole book, like most of J. M. Coetzee's prose, written in the present tense—now the Russian singer joins her, a woman who, like Costello herself, is a member of the education and entertainment staff on board the Northern Lights, a cruise ship on its way from New Zealand to South Africa. “‘An albatross,’” Costello explains to the Russian singer, “‘that is the English word. I don't know what they call themselves’” (56).

The language of the albatross had been lost even before the fall, since Adam, when naming the animals in Paradise, did not ask them how they call themselves (at least not according to Gen. 1:19ff). It is not just that the English word albatross does not reference any Adamitic primary language. This Adamitic language had already colonized the language of the animals themselves, an act of naming preceding other forms of violent domination, for example, that which characterized the “penguin industry” for which Macquarie Island had served as a hub in the nineteenth century (55).

This intimation of a pre-Adamitic language is, however, faint. More than once, Coetzee evokes moments of something beyond human language, but he never indulges in painting a world in which “non-verbal communication would break open the prison house of language.” Costello and the Russian singer do not lose themselves in devout contemplation of the bird so much as turn to a trivial topic: a man. The man in question is another member of the entertainment staff, the Nigerian writer Emanuel Egudu, with whom Elizabeth Costello had spent three nights many years before during a PEN conference in Kuala Lumpur. In the morning, immediately before the stopover at Macquarie Island, she had seen the singer coming out of Egudu's cabin (54), and perhaps, therefore, she feels a little jealous (57).